Whenever a major social crisis or issue receives attention, the gut reaction seems to be to localize it. If we're talking about racism: "Only in the South." If it's AIDS: "Only in the gay male community ... or maybe Africa." And in the current case of rape at University of Colorado: "It's that damn football team."
Six women have come forward over the past two weeks after former place-kicker Katie Hnida revealed to Sports Illustrated that she was raped by a teammate and constantly harassed by the entire team. A 17-year-old woman also alleged that she was raped at a recruiting party. CU football coach, Gary Barnett, was suspended when his first reaction to these horrific crimes was to deride Hnida as an "awful" football player. Barnett evidently said that he "would back his player 100 percent if she took this forward in the criminal process." An inquiry will determine whether a rape-condoning environment exists on the team -- which will consequently determine Barnett's future job status -- as if seven reported rapes (forget those that were never made public) weren't a good enough answer to that question.
On the surface, one of the main problems is the violence women experience when they try to break into formerly all-male spheres from which they were previously excluded. For example, last year's outpouring of rape accusations at the Air Force Academy and the recent news that 112 rapes were reported by female troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and the region.
However, in the coverage of the controversy out west, another wrong has been committed: The media has painted the situation as one endemic only or primarily to the CU's football team, highlighting all of the scandals that have taken place at the nation's top party school. An editorial in The New York Times last week described the problem as an athletic one, and mandated NCAA intervention to clean up the "athletic subculture." While attacking sexism and sexual violence wherever they exist -- including athletic and other predominantly male communities -- the coverage of them fails to see sexual violence as any more than an athletic dilemma. Professors, students and journalists quoted on the matter are treating football teams like singular regressive realms where all of the sexism lurks to the chagrin of the campus.
While pointing out the role of athletics and the feelings of grandiosity in such debates is important, it allows everyone else to abdicate responsibility. The truth is that one-quarter to one-sixth of college women sexually assaulted are not being violated just by athletes. The problem stretches from supposedly "nice guys" to men jumping out of bushes; no one group is responsible and to treat it as such does a disservice to the man who goes out thinking he could never rape because he's not an athlete or a member of an all-male group, or the woman who thinks she is safe because she's not at the football-dominated fraternity.
While the implicit message -- "You're not safe anywhere" -- may seem alarmist, it's largely the truth even at Dartmouth, where 166 sexual assaults were reported since 1999 -- 78 of those being rapes or attempted rapes, according to the Sexual Abuse Awareness Program.
CU's student body is seven times the size of Dartmouth's, but all that anyone can think of are those seven cases out west involving football players. It is time the media did its part in analyzing the dynamics of entire universities and, indeed, the national culture, rather than throwing up the Colorado football team as a sacrificial lamb to satiate the appetites of those wanting to see action taken.
It is also, and probably more so, time that colleges and universities step up and declare that hundreds of rapes on their property and among their students are unacceptable. Some university must take charge to be a test case, a beacon on the hill, and make a widespread institutional commitment, dedicate significant resources and require intensive training and education of all students to counteract the rape-friendly atmospheres evident in the staggering number of assaults.
I would suggest that Dartmouth be the first to accept this challenge, but I've been here for four years -- I know better than to expect more than sincere incrementalism as women and men continue to be raped. Why can I never get over the feeling that if the sexes were switched (in most cases) and we had over a dozen men reporting being raped each year, or if 166 men were being violently beaten on this campus every four years, I would be sitting in an intensive violence-prevention seminar right now with nationally recognized trainers, little regard being paid to the expense or the administrative fine points of the program?
